What happened to the population bomb?

Great Debates
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QED is right. There is a population problem. This is what the OP was about.

There will most likely be a 50% increase in the population (from 6 bill to 9 bill) in the next 50 years, if the medium variant is followed. This is huge. The planet has just gone through the same increase in the last 50 years - the first 3 billion took considerably longer.

I do not know what blake is blathering on about half the time (can you put your quotes in context). The issue is not that the rate of increase is decreasing, it is that the population of the planet is INCREASING RAPIDLY. This will put huge strains on resources before the population gets the the point where it starts decreasing.

The UN models take into account improved provision of medicine and hygene to less developed countries. If these improvements are not delivered the higher variant could easily be followed (an extra half child more per woman (on average)) and the population reach 10.6 billion in 2050, with no peaking modelled in this variant (see UN report graph).

22

Has anyone said otherwise?

Perhaps you could let ** Aalborg** decide what the OP was about, rather than putting words in their mouth. Th eOP is aboiut “What happened to the population bomb?”. It says so right there in black and white Antechinus. No wonder you can’t understand what is posted, you can’t even understand what the OP is about when it is posted clearly in the topic bar.

The population bomb is the name of a book and a scenario proposed and expounded by Paul Ehrlich, with assistance form others, in the 60s and 70s. It was a scenario of catastrophe brought about by population growth, as I have illustrated above. That is what the population bomb is, that is what the Op is about. The answer to the question “What happened to the population bomb” is that it was ridiculous hype and never existed on any meaningful sense.

I don’t know what you are prattling about at all. But let’s see if we can clear this up. You said that people were not volountarily controlling their fertility “in the areas that need to control fertility”. Please explain whether you believe that fertility control is not being practiced in China, or if you simply belive that China does not need fertility control. You must believe one of those things to make the ridiculous statement that fertility control “ is not being practiced “in the areas that need to control fertility”, and either belief is equally ignorant and needs to be dispelled for your own benefit.

Do you understand now Anthechinus?

The issue is that QED believes, and you agree, that smaller families are only the norm in western culture, and that in the rest of the world family sizes are either increasing or static. Can you please provide evidence to support this belief? If not can you explain how family sizes are increasing or remaining static while population as a whole is growing, and yet population growth is slowing? Clearly the rate of increase is the issue here, since it shows the ignorance of QED’s belief. A belief which you claim “is right”. How can there be more and larger families and yet population growth be decreasing Antechinus? I have asked this before and you ignored it. But since this is GQ I am calling you out.

Cite? What is that based on? How do you define huge? Which resources will be put under strain? How do you know this?

Any reason to believe this would not occur? Given that the trend for the last 150 years has been increased and ever accelerating rates of globalisation and increasing and ever accelerating rates of rates of provision of medicine and hygiene to less developed countries why do you believe this trend could easily be reversed?

Basically Antechinus you have “me too”ed QED but totally failed to answer the direct questions I put to you. Let’s see if you can do so this time/ Saying that you don’t understand what I have posted is a bit lame. Typos aside the questions aren’t that hard. Just to show the readers how easy they are I will post them again to see if you can support your ridiculous assertion that population growth can decrease despite longer lifespans, increased population and people generally not controlling fertility. Ready Antechinus?

How can you argue that either it is not being practiced in India and China, or that those areas do not need to control fertility? How do you decide what areas need to practice fertility control? Do you believe that Australia, Western Europe and North America are underpopulated and thus do not need ti practice fertility control any more? What do you suppose would be the impact of total lack of fertility control on the USA? Given those impacts how can you argue that fertility control is no longer needed in the US?

We’re all waiting “mate’.

23

And since Antechinus doesn’;t seem to understand what the OP is about, let’s give him a hand in understanding the population bomb. Then we can try to explain what happened to it.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q="the+population+bomb"&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&meta=

24

This site is a good read on the topic of overpopulation.

The FAQ and the introductory essay are a good place to start.

25

Blake - I think everyone would agree that Ehrlich’s book, which was written ~1968 overstated things a little. You said that in your first post. I dont thing anyone disagreed.

I disagree that ‘the topic’ “never existed in any meaningful sense”. The data in the UN report should support this.

I understand Aalborgs question relates to media coverage of the population problem. The topic has not gone away, the media has just put it on the backburner.

In answer to blakes question on contraceptive use - from the UN Population Division site:
Africa 20% of married women currently (1998) using contraception
Asia 60%
Europe 71%

26

All extrapolation is essentially a form of reading tea leaves. As I have learned over and over, given N data points from which one derives a model, what can rigorously be said about the behavior of the model outside the confines of minimum and maximum values of X(1…N)? Nothing. Prognostication may be forced by circumstance, but it is ridiculous to take it to cultlike levels of devotion.

What happened to the “Population Bomb”? It was an incomplete and highly extrapolatory model. People who say “The End is Coming” are never wrong, they’re just “a little premature”. That’s the thing about doomsday cults–they always somehow manage to revise their claims post hoc. Let us not forget that the world ended in 1917.

27

Forgive me.

I put X(1…N) when I should have put X(1…M).

28

Ok, see, there you go again putting words in my mouth. My exact statement was “I do know that at current population growth rates, there will eventually come a point where the resources on Earth cannot support us.” What part of “current growth rates” are you not understanding? I’m not sure what you are trying to argue. Half the time you seem to be saying that overpopulation will not ever be a problem, no matter what, and the other half of the time you say no one has been saying overpopulation is a problem. Well, which is it? In any case, this is not GD. If you wish to open a thread on this topic there, feel free. But I will not continue this debate if you continue to twist my words.

29

I think the UN population report (cited earlier, good read ^_^) had the answer to the OP on page viii section 7:

That Ehlrich report was written in the 1960’s. People can’t expect “remarkable” things to happen when looking at current data and extrapolating to the future.

I haven’t had much time to read it, was there anything in the report (or anywhere else) that factors in some plausible but remarkable possibilities like a cure for AIDS, or the Pope allowing birth control?

Also, is there any cite that shows what human population levels are actually supportable by the Earth?

-k

30

This is a good question, and I’ve been looking, but can’t nail down a definitive answer. I’ve read numbers anywhere between 9 and 20 billion. The problem is there are a great number of variables which make this a dificult figure to define. Surely there must be a limit.

31

I think we’re well into GD territory now, so I’ll just go ahead and move this thread over there.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

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      • If I am remembering corectly: Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist by profession. Why studying insects pre-qualified him for human sociology I don’t know.
  • Whatever you think of the “population problem”, you have to admit that Paul Ehrlich was wrong on almost every prediction he made in his “landmark” book–even the short-term ones never happened.
    ~
33

In many parts of the world, underpopulation is an increasing problem.

In the lovely city of Bologna, Italy the current birth rate is 0.8 children per child. This is a big problem because "In 20 years, at present birth rates, for every child under the age of 5 in Bologna there will be 25 people over the age of 50 – and 10 of them will be older than 80. " How can the young population support the old?

There is no longer a single country in Europe where people are having enough children to replace themselves when they die.

The problem is too many people in one place, and not enough in another. Controlled immigration might help, but the countries involved would have to accept a huge number of people from very foreign cultures to raise their population rates.

If Italy starts inviting large numbers of people from Sudan to immigrate, it would totally change the feeling of Italy. That’s not necessarily bad, but of course change is scary.

34

I believe that an International Agreement should be made, to guarentee that all Population Bomb explosions will take place underground.

:wink: :smiley:

35

Chronos quote:

To which the solution is to encourage the development of those countries. This is where the medicine and hygeine comes in.

Blake

Development, better education and modernization are associated with lower birth rates, true. I would have to say, though, that international aid - in the form of improved hygiene and medicine - to very poor countries have not usually produced these results by themselves. Some of the poorest African countries have been receiving humanitarian aid for about 50 years and are not much better off than they were. Infant mortality has dropped but the standard of living generally has not improved much. I’m not saying the developed world should not provide such aid, but that I question whether it has created more developed nations. Certainly providing access to family planning and contraception methods allows families to control their growth if they want to, which is important.

According to the UNFPA, even though the annual rate of population growth has slowed from 2% in the 60s to less than 1.4 per cent today, the base population continues to increase. The number of people added to the world’s population each year has increased to about 77 million people a year, compared to about 53 million in the 1960s.

You have to also take into account the age structure of populations. In the developing world as a whole, about a third of the population is under age 15, while in the industrialized world, less than one fifth of the population is under age 15. So even if fertility drops in the third world to the replacement level of 2.1 children, about two-thirds of the population growth currently projected would still take place as these young people enter their childbearing years.

I’m not saying I know how this will resolve, except to say that population will eventually drop, one way or another. AIDS controls population growth, as one poster said, but it does so by killing off the most productive age group - the parents, teachers, health care workers, crop planters and harvesters, and those who look after the elderly as well as the young. It has been a de-stabilizing disaster in countries with the highest rates and certainly could never be seen as a healthy “culling” of excess population.

36

I will say what resource will be (and already is limiting) : energy.

We are facing a very large problem as oil depletion starts to curtail the amount of easily produced energy , especially for transportation and food production. As the amount of energy available reduces, the carrying capacity will also reduce, and thus the population. The world will not reach 9 billion, but somewhat lower than that and the reductions will not be all because of lower birth rates.

Also, there is not enough oil for even China to continue to “develop” to the level of energy consumption (per capita) that the United States already enjoys. So, developing countries to the state of living that will curtail their population (assuming for the moment that each culture would react the same as the western developed nations have in that respect) will not be possible.

See these sites for oil depletion information and energy per capita data, etc.

Population is a problem right now - and will get worse as the energy available for supporting the growing world population becomes less available.
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/index.html

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/

http://www.oilanalytics.org/

http://www.dieoff.org/

37

Education of women —> Reduced population growth.

It’s been demonstrated over and over again.